The Words I’ve Been Waiting to Hear

Paul and I have been together for a long time and over the years, we have built up a million zillion memories.

I remember our first date when he told me he was going to marry me. I remember when he did.

I remember the first words out of his mouth when we found out I was pregnant the first, second and third times. I remember his phone call when he told me that he wanted to start a home business, and the phone call three years later telling me he had found a warehouse for us to move the business into, and five years after that when he told me we had a buyer for the business and we were free to move to Washington.

I remember Paul’s words when he told me that Ryan had run into a metal shelf and had split his knee wide open and the only thing in the world that Ryan wanted was me. And when Paul called to tell me that a mailbox had tackled Nick and broken his front tooth and that Nick wasn’t upset until he heard how much it cost to fix a tooth.

And then this past Monday, I got a phone call that started with even more words I won’t forget for a very long time: “We Are a Feed Mill.”

It seems like such a little thing, but the road to this moment has been long and windy. Check out Paul’s blog for more information, and the farm website for information on buying feed.

And leave your own words of congratulations for Paul.

Tastes just like chicken

We are just finishing up a weekend of very, very hard work. It was the weekend for getting everyone their Thanksgiving turkeys and the last of the year’s chickens. What made all the hard work so much easier was the opportunity to talk with the people who have been enjoying our chickens all summer.

We were told over and over by almost everyone how amazing our chicken tastes. This contrasts dramatically with comments I get from others who can’t imagine that there could possibly be a reason to purchase chicken anywhere but the grocery store. I’ve tried to describe it to non-believers a number of ways. The best I could ever come up with is that our birds taste just like chicken, only chicken-ier. I wish I could explain it better, but there’s no way to describe the taste difference between our birds and the ones in the store.

It’s like the difference between a grocery store tomato in the middle of winter and one picked fresh from your garden on a beautiful summer day.

A bag of frozen strawberries or a basket fresh from the farmer’s market sold to you by the little 12-year-old girl that helped to pick them that morning.

Canned corn versus U-Pick corn rushed straight into a pot of boiling water.

Think about it in these terms. Of course there’s a difference. Now, think about poultry. You can have chicken that’s been raised indoors – even if it was raised humanely – or you can eat chicken that as soon as it was old enough to leave the brooder, had fresh green grass, juicy tasty bugs, fresh air and sunshine.

How could it not taste better?

Will Work for Food

I’m certain there are times that the boys don’t think raising chickens is worth it. Like at 5:30 a.m. when the have to feed and water them before school.

Or when they want to go out with friends, but they have to make sure that someone will check in on them every 4-5 hours, or more often if it’s hot.

And then there’s the weekends when they have to get up at 5 a.m. and process 50-100 chickens for customers who are on their way.

But the one time they really don’t complain is when dinner’s on the table. And they get Barbeque Chicken that looks like this:

Or Parmesan Chicken that tastes as good as it looks:

Strange how they don’t complain about the work so much at dinner time.

I’ll take Things That Grow for $1,000

One of the best parts of living out here, and raising animals and having a garden is seeing everything change before our eyes.

The baby ducks…

and baby geese…

baby radishes…

And only a couple weeks ago these teenage chicks were these little babies…

And really, I don’t think this picture was taken more than a month ago…

So how did this happen?

Where the Green Grass Grows

This past week has been a challenge.

And yes, in this case, “challenge” is a euphemism for “hellacious”.

Paul and I are used to working long, hard hours. When we owned our business in Texas, there were many weeks when we both had to work 60-70 hours, and we would drag ourselves into the house at some horrendous hour and stumble to bed hoping to shut our minds down long enough to get even just four hours of sleep before we had to start all over again.

Those days, those weeks were hard. And because we were both very instrumental and involved in the business, one of us never had a week like that, those weeks hit us both.

Since moving and taking jobs in the “real world”, we haven’t had a whammy week like that with both of us hit at the same time. Until this past week.

The non-profit I work for had its big annual fundraiser this week, which meant early mornings and late nights. And Paul’s company decided to do re-sets of all the area stores, and pulled all store managers in to work twelve-hour long overnight shifts. This meant that on a good day, Paul and I saw each other for 15 minutes between the time he got home in the morning and the time I dashed out the door to work.

But really, this schedule, while exhausting, couldn’t knock us down. Nope, we had to find other things to really challenge us.

Like adding a mandatory-participation science fair on the same day as the fundraiser.

And receiving an order of 100 baby chicks of which 40 were dead when delivered, and 4 more died in the next couple of days.

Then, just to really add to the fun, we had a dog cut her paw and run in circles around our living room carpet, necessitating an emergency call to a carpet cleaner because we just didn’t have the time/energy to take care of it ourselves. And like the blood stains in Macbeth, these also are reappearing and now we have a hundred little round stains all over the carpet.

But don’t forget that we also have a farm to run, and this week required intensive gardening with over 100 tomato plants going in along with numerous other veggie starts and seeds.

AND it was also the first week of chicken processing, with 50 birds needing to be processed and packaged for customers.

And with customers coming to pick up birds, the house had to be at least a little bit presentable, and we had to make that happen.

…

So, here I am at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning, and for the first time in over a week, I feel like my brain has started to return to its normal processing speed. And although most of the muscles in my body are still screaming at me. I can look look back and see that through this past week’s screams of frustration, tears of exhaustion and chaos of life, there are certainties all around me.

I am certain that life is good. Through the open door beside me, I see rows of tomato plants, I hear the twittering of birds and the clucking of hens, I feel the calmness of the morning and the peace of the land.

And I am certain that I am blessed. I have an amazing husband who works hard to support us. I have three boys who are growing into strong and capable men, I have parents who step up to help when I’m stumbling.

And so, again, its six in the morning. My house is messy. My carpet is spotty. My laundry is piled up. My cupboards are bare of anything that resembles food and I have no idea where the hens have been laying their eggs lately, but they’re not using the henhouse.

But I smile. Because I am certainly happy.